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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

Original poster

To ask about your petty neighbour experiences

141 replies

Dotty1219 · 28/02/2021 11:20

Kind of lighthearted because its so ridiculous, but also not because the cheek has actually annoyed me 😂

Backstory: DP and I live on a row of 5 houses, with a shared yard (but everyone has their own parking spaces). The house we live in used to belong to my grandparents. On the end there's another couple (I'm guessing around 60 and 80 years old) who are not very nice people. Constantly trying to control what other neighbours do, where they can park, harassing them, reporting them for silly things like kids playing in the yard, they've had issues with every single neighbour. I'm sure you know the sort. Weve never had any issues with them really as we've kept our heads down, until now when we committed the ultimate sin of using the outdoor tap to wash the dogs muddy feet. 😂
This tap is communal, we all pay a share of the water, it doesn't belong to anybody. Weve used it about 3 times in 4 years, but the nasty neighbour uses it all the time.
He told me we couldn't use it as it was broken (but I've seen him using it after this) and I've notice this week he's put a bag over it and tied it up so nobody else can use it 😂 I can't get over the pettiness. Half of me is tempted to go and take it off and use it everyday to make a point. The other half of my brain is telling me to leave it, I don't really use it anyway and not to make trouble.
I'm just absolutely gobsmacked by the audacity. Can anyone else top my petty neighbour? Would I be unreasonable to start using the tap daily to have a wash 😂 should I surrender in the tap war?

OP posts:
BonnieDundee · 01/03/2021 20:52

At a previous house, we lived on a terrace and each house had a small front garden. In the autumn when the leaves blew off the trees, one neighbour would sweep up the leaves in his garden, divide them by type and return them to the relevant neighbours

Waffles wins the thread Grin

mycatisgivingyouthefinger · 01/03/2021 21:27

@BonnieDundee

At a previous house, we lived on a terrace and each house had a small front garden. In the autumn when the leaves blew off the trees, one neighbour would sweep up the leaves in his garden, divide them by type and return them to the relevant neighbours

Waffles wins the thread Grin

I dunno, crazy Irish lady is a strong contender...

BonnieDundee · 01/03/2021 21:39

A draw? Grin

user1471538283 · 01/03/2021 21:58

I had a neighbour who reported me for fly tipping when I didn't even know the mess the previous owners had left behind was behind the back gate. She threatened to report my DS and his friends for playing with a ball in the street. She tried to give my neighbours DH £10 for cutting down his own tree. She wanted to know who my sister was and why she had a key to my house.

Another neighbour wanted so much attention the creepy translucent man. So he stole my recycling bin, played loud music, lifted weights in his garden, stole my ladder (from our skip so I didn't mind) and tried to make eye contact with me all the time.

Baublebox · 01/03/2021 22:06

We used to live in a terraced house with a low wall between us and next door.
The woman next door complained that my bedsheets blew into the air on her side of the wall and sent a note banning me from line drying bedding as there was no way of putting it out without this happening.
It probably went over by 5cm when the wind blew in that direction and she was neither in her garden or wanting to use the garden.
She Waldo complained everyone I dried my underwear on the line as it gave her husband 'thoughts'.
When I wouldn't stop she tried to intercept my mum coming to visit so that she could sort me out. Grin

Baublebox · 01/03/2021 22:07

Also
Every time

Joanofbach · 01/03/2021 22:16

@Brabraboo do you have seagulls in your area? They're responsible for a lot of the fast food mess here (they climb into the bins and take the wrappers out). The rest of the time it's squirrels!

JerichoGirl · 01/03/2021 22:20

Tiktokersmiracle
I'm now hoping my offended by Christmas neighbour has a Christmas decoration truck write his car off or some such other justice

🤞🤞🤞🤞

JerichoGirl · 01/03/2021 22:21

@Hcolhcsra

If we're going for poetic justice, the neighbour who wants to use our drive for reversing onto has just reversed into his own gatepost. You couldn't write it.
😂 😂 😂
YorkshirePuddingsGreatestFan · 01/03/2021 23:05

I had a passive aggressive anonymous note through the door complaining about my cat shitting all over their garden.

I don't own a cat Confused

BlackeyedSusan · 01/03/2021 23:25

we have the old fashioned dustibins. I had two kids in nappies at the time. cheeky fucker twats decided to stuff all their rubbish and recycling in my bin leaving me with a bag of nappies which would not go anywhere...pissed off, i took out their untied carrier bag off rubbish, put my own stuff in and returned their bag leaning up against the front door, banged on their door aand stomped off. I was not there to see if it all fell into their flat or not, but they used their own bin after that. they would have had plenty of room if they had just recycled their stuff to the recycling bins across the road, which they passed everyday...

eeek88 · 01/03/2021 23:32

He bolted a pig’s skull to the gatepost between our land and his, during the death throes of a dispute in which he didn’t have a leg to stand on. It had great big tusks. I loved it and was quite sorry when about 18 months later he removed it.

In case anybody’s wondering it definitely wasn’t put there for his own aesthetic pleasure- it was positioned in such a way that I’d see it multiple times a day and he’d only see it once a week or so,

hadtojoin · 02/03/2021 00:15

I moved into a mid terraced house. The neighbour in the end house told me that I couldn't leave my wheelie bin in my front garden ( it was discretly positioned behind my hedge) and that I had to keep it in my back garden and wheel it through my house to the front to be emptied each week.
It stayed where it was !

ScotInExile · 02/03/2021 01:07

Our row of terraced houses has the water main running down through all our back gardens. As the houses are all private property the water board have no responsibility for repairs if anything goes wrong so the cost of repairs and maintenance are the joint responsibility of all the owners in the row. This means that if you need repairs done solely on your section the cost is technically to be shared by all property owners though in practice everyone just takes care of their own.

We had a leak in the water main in our section and had to get it repaired. To enable this to happen we needed access to the garden of the end house on the terrace to shut off the water supply so the pipe could be replaced. The owner of that house refused access, for no other reason than he just didn't want to, so we had to access another neighbour's garden, dig a hole and freeze the pipe so that the length in our garden could be replaced. We paid for all of this ourselves (about $2000) as we didn't think it was reasonable to ask everyone else to chip in.

As the old water main is very old and starting to crumble, two of our other neighbours in the terrace decided to get theirs replaced soon after we got ours done to avoid having the same burst pipe and flooding problem we had. They had the same obstacle with the guy in the end house refusing access to shut off the water. They each paid for their section themselves at a similar cost to ours. We suggested to the guy in the first house that he might want to consider replacing the pipes in his section too as the plumber said they are likely to fail but he declined.

About 6 months later he had a leak in his garden and when he tried to turn off the water at the mains (that only he has access to) he discovered that it had seized so his repair job was much larger and more expensive than it should have been. He then issued all of us in the terrace an invoice for our part in repairing his pipes. Had he allowed us access to his garden 6 months before when we needed it we would have discovered the seized shut-off valve and repaired it and paid for it ourselves. As it was we all refused to pay our share of his repairs unless he was willing to first pay us his share of our repairs, and other other 2 neighbours' repairs. Funnily enough, he didn't pursue payment.

HerRoyalNotness · 02/03/2021 01:16

@BreakfastOfWaffles

At a previous house, we lived on a terrace and each house had a small front garden. In the autumn when the leaves blew off the trees, one neighbour would sweep up the leaves in his garden, divide them by type and return them to the relevant neighbours! 😂
OMG 😂 😂
Hawkins001 · 02/03/2021 02:01

Thankfully mine are ok, some of these are certainly unusual

CrazyCatLazy · 02/03/2021 02:20

Nothing half as bad as some of these but when I had a new bathroom fitted it was discovered that my internal stop tap didn’t work. To replace this they needed to turn the external one off in order to change the internal. NDN wouldn’t allow the water board to do to enter their front garden by 1 ft to turn it off (for 5 houses it was in their garden). NDN banged on my door demanding to know why they needed access and in their 30 years of living there - nobody had ever needed it! “I had a new bathroom with none of this palaver”.
The water board ended up bypassing them and fitting a new one at the top of their drive on the path.
Brilliantly this then caused a major leak and all the houses in the street were without water for 24 hrs and issues for a week with a dug up path - all because they wouldn’t let them turn it off for an hour in their garden.

Rememberallball · 02/03/2021 02:40

@thepeopleversuswork

Oh God how long have you got.

My upstairs neighbour has tried to control every aspect of the way I live.

No using my hairdryer after 10.30pm. No barbecues in the back garden. She has complained to the freeholder about the noise made by people closing doors in my house. She called me at work one day to ask me to remove an empty bin liner which had found its way into her wheelie bin (she was wrongly convinced it was mine). She threatened me with legal action because I refused to shell out to fix a problem with her boiler.

Honestly its the most draining thing and I have completely run out of patience.

@thepeopleversuswork, did you post about the neighbour and her boiler issue/expecting you to pay for the repairs at the time? I only ask because, as soon as I read your post, I seem to remember reading about a neighbour demanding the person posting pay for repairs to their boiler which were (obviously) nothing to do with said poster!!
cantthinkofauniquename · 02/03/2021 02:52

@eeek88

He bolted a pig’s skull to the gatepost between our land and his, during the death throes of a dispute in which he didn’t have a leg to stand on. It had great big tusks. I loved it and was quite sorry when about 18 months later he removed it.

In case anybody’s wondering it definitely wasn’t put there for his own aesthetic pleasure- it was positioned in such a way that I’d see it multiple times a day and he’d only see it once a week or so,

I feel like I need the back-story to this! 🤣
Sapho47 · 02/03/2021 03:09

@EggysMom

Last summer our neighbours would take advantage of the nice weather to have a barbecue in their back garden. I wouldn't have minded if it was evening, but they'd light it around 3pm whilst I still had washing on the line, so I'd have to make a mad dash to bring in the washing and then drape it around the house to finish drying.

Over winter they've now got into a habit of burning excess cardboard in an incinerator in the middle of the weekend afternoon. (For some reason, they haven't considered asking the council for a larger cardboard recycling bin.) This now means I cannot hang out weekend washing in the afternoon on sunny spring days also. Hmmmmmmph.

Why should I have to do washing on weekdays (I work) or get up at stupid o'clock so that it's on the line by 8am and dry by noon?

Why should I have to do washing on weekdays (I work) or get up at stupid o'clock so that it's on the line by 8am and dry by noon?

Because you're too much of a wimp to even talk to your neighbours?

"Hey if you see my washing out can you give me a heads up before you light the bbq/fire as it all ends up stinking, cheers thanks bye"

PerveenMistry · 02/03/2021 03:23

@JorisBonson

Our neighbour started screaming and weeping at DH because our cat caught a bird. She kept calling it "my bird". It was not her pet, it was literally a bird she saw.

Actually I think it's obnoxious to let pet cats roam and kill wildlife.

I don't own the birds that come to my feeders but definitely recognize the more unusual or scarce ones.

Control your cat.

BitOfFun · 02/03/2021 03:31

I've never owned a cat, but even I know that's asking a bit much!

PerveenMistry · 02/03/2021 03:32

@Hcolhcsra

If we're going for poetic justice, the neighbour who wants to use our drive for reversing onto has just reversed into his own gatepost. You couldn't write it.

Priceless!

PerveenMistry · 02/03/2021 03:38

@BitOfFun

I've never owned a cat, but even I know that's asking a bit much!
Cats can be taken out on leash same as dogs. They are domestic pets, not wild rovers.
Moelwynbach · 02/03/2021 04:29

We live near a T junction to a main road which is double yellow lined. Some of the people who live there park the cars on our street there are no drives. There is a flat above a shop on the corner and a new couple have moved in they think they own the spot outside their flat and have posted large aggressive notes on people's windscreens. I caught them taping a piece of wallpaper to one neighbours car. I sneaked out and took it off sticking it to their windscreen. It was a cold night and it froze to the windscreen. It was an absolute ballache to get off the next day. Oh how we laughed!